My new pen pal

They sent me this:

Response:

Shawn Green
Circulation Director
Harper’s Magazine

Dear Shawn:

Thank you for your recent letter.

Of all the people who regularly write me to ask about the money I owe them, you have the nicest manners. You don’t even mention late fees.

I commend you and your magazine, and enclose a hefty $19. Please consider my leap to an 18-month subscription an endorsement of your graceful correspondence.

I regret any concern my silence may have caused you.

Sincerely,

Kate Golden

Aspire to Asperger’s

Regarding the Jena 6:

Last week John McWhorter of the Manhattan Institute read a rational and eloquent commentary on NPR suggesting that the best way for society to deal with a noose is to ignore it.

Big response. An uproar from people who did not ignore the nooses of Jena.

This week McWhorter went live on NPR. He told the nation that if someone put a noose on his door, he wouldn’t get mad or scared or anything at all. He would ignore it.

It’s hard to imagine this reaction in a human with a normal emotional range. The noose’s symbolic power is undeniable. I aspire to ignore it. But I wonder if perhaps McWhorter does not have a normal emotional range.

Slate.com: Keep on swinging, kids

I’m humbled by Slate reporters’ orneriness on pretty much every subject in the news (today’s example: the genre of edgeless indie rock). They’re like that guy in your freshman seminar who insists on disagreeing with everything, and ends up rousing even the most hungover classmate to fiery retort. I imagine it must tax the mind to be always looking for a fight. The whole’s effect is farcical, so I limit myself to little bits, just when I need to sand off some cynicism.

Accounting for ill will

The BBC reports that someone wants to assassinate Vladimir Putin next week. I assume there are plenty of people who are actively trying to snuff him, and many more who wish something nasty would happen to him. I wonder how many murder plots are afoot in the whole world right now? How many of them are mere death wishes and how many are in the planning stage? How many will succeed?

Eos greets the world!

You have to set out the rules in the first post. I know as you know that blogs are better when they stick to a topic, like ostrich husbandry or life as a polygynist. So a brief sigh, everyone, as I toss that idea and relegate myself to mediocrity-at-best. If I get ideas about ostriches, or about ostriches with multiple partners, or opossums with multiple partners, they all go here, as long as they happen before coffee. It’s because I’m insane in the morning — I haven’t used an alarm clock for years — but I always feel the morning vigor pauses, and then slides irretrievably away, by about 10:30 a.m. So I like to think of this as my mental compost pile, It can bubble, bubble the rest of the day without me. And then I can use it as fertilizer.